Just keep your mind open and suck in the experience.And if it hurts,it's probably worth it.God is Love!

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

The Return of the Hacker Ethic

We can see more and more hackers to join the biology field today. There's a good brief about how the hacker ethic influences hackers on making the paradigm shift from computer hacking to biohacking in Weis's article Biohacking: The Beginning of the Biological Revolution". Hacker ethic was started in computer hacking at MIT in east coast of US in 1950s. Computer hackers created the revolution of electronical computer, and now the paradigm of "just for fun in garage" seems happenning in biology field, biohackers have been making the equipments by hands such as openPCR, which can copy and manipulate the DNA stuff, it only costs $500. Some biohacker's community(DIYbio, Genspace and ) are emerging in the east coast. Hacker ethic is now forming from yesterday's cyberpunk to today's biopunk, and today's biohackers will become tommorrow's technological leaders. Maybe the early computer hacker Bill Gates is right at this point:"Creating artificial life with DNA synthesis. That’s sort of the equivalent of machine-language programming...If you want to change the world in some big way, that’s where you should start — biological molecules...There are more opportunities now...But they’re different opportunities. They need the same type of crazy fanaticism of youthful genius that drove the PC industry — and can have the same impact on the human condition.”.

In the 20th century, the rapid development of Physics gave possibility of building computer hardware, and formal system had already became the stonecorner of computer software design. But, along with the high speed of the technology development increasing the complexity, which makes human beings like a fool. We have had to hack the new/unfamiliar methodology what we called wholism, which the opposite is reductionism. We've been getting a lot of experience about how to deal with complexity from the journey of computer hardware/software hacks since Unix system was born. Now we/hackers will take these experience on next hacking field --- biological field. May God of Technology bless the offspring of Alonzo Church, Alan Turing and John Von Neumann!